The entrepreneurial university and the mediation of crisis: A study of university research magazines

My dissertation is a response to the lacuna in the literature regarding the semiotic moments of the entrepreneurial university. The scholars on the entrepreneurial university describe a new knowledge regime that cinches the university to the global trade competition. These sources ignore the semiotic moments of the culture of competitiveness. In this dissertation I propose a third leg to the entrepreneurial turn which takes seriously these semiotic moments. I use university research magazines as primary texts, arguing that these magazines are representative of the technological and scientific advances that are crucial to the entrepreneurial university. I argue that the entrepreneurial university is legitimized as a lynchpin in the development of scientific research meant at once for human and capital regeneration.;My general findings are as follows: 1. How a fundamental singularity of research universities in the KBE is the representation of their research as directly answering to pressing human needs. 2. How answering to these needs results not from society but from the participation of university actors in entrepreneurial behavior. 3. How discourses of entrepreneurship derive legitimacy not explicitly through logics of explanation but through logics of appearance and through authorization vis-a-vis the university's relation to the market.;The entrepreneurial university is not only "realized" by state actors participating in institutionally specific structures adhering to the entrepreneurial turn, but by state actors aligning their particular research interests to the application of pressing human needs.